User:Feoffer/sandbox UFO Hoaxes

Jessup, The Case for the UFO, and the Philadelphia experiment
In 1955 UFO researcher Morris K. Jessup published The Case for the UFO, in which he argued that UFOs represented a mysterious subject worthy of further study. Jessup speculated that UFOs were "exploratory craft of 'solid' and 'nebulous' character." In that work, Jessup reported speculation that Phobos might be an artificial satellite and that Transient Lunar Phenomenon might by linked to UFOS. Jessup recommended amateur astronomers monitor the "gravitational neutral of the earth-sun-moon systems". Jessup expressed concerns that the Soviet Union may have obtained a crashed craft and might be reverse-engineering the technology. Jessup even consider a scenario in which "the space people have taken over the Russian high officialdom and are directing their efforts and supplying know-how". Jessup references a "monolith" of non-human origin being uncovered by highway construction crews in Hornbrook, California, cite March 1950 story in Fate magazine. He theorized space people may abduct humans, citing it as one potential solution to mysteries like the Mary Celeste. Jessup speculated ancient stone structures had been moved with the help of spaceships.

Jessup explicitly connected UFOs and religion, writing: "Let us revive from the sedative idea fostered by both science and religion that man, homo sapiens, of here and now, of the United States and today, is the final, glorious, end-point in the work of an omnipotent and benevolent creator, all alone in an infinite universe. It cannot be true and in our honest hearts all of us know that it is not so." Jessup speculates "They didn’t have to come all of those millions of miles from anywhere. They have been here for thousands of years. Whether we belong to them by possession, like cattle, or whether we belong to each other by common origin and association is an interesting problem"

Allende contact
Shortly thereafter, he received two letters from Carlos Miguel Allende in which Allende claimed to have witnessed a secret World War II experiment at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Allende claimed the destroyer escort USS Eldridge was rendered invisible, teleported to New York, teleported to another dimension where it encountered aliens, and teleported through time, resulting in the deaths of several sailors, some of whom were fused with the ship's hull. Jessup initially dismissed Allende as a "crackpot".

In early 1957 Jessup was alleged contacted by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in Washington, D.C., who had received a parcel containing a paperback copy of The Case for the UFO in a manila envelope marked "Happy Easter." The book had been extensively annotated in its margins, written with three different shades of pink ink, appearing to detail a correspondence among three individuals, only one of whom is given a name: "Jemi." The ONR labelled the other two "Mr. A." and "Mr. B."

The annotators referred to each other as "Gypsies" and discussed two different types of "people" living in outer space. Their text contained non-standard use of capitalization and punctuation, and detailed a lengthy discussion of the merits of various elements of Jessup's assumptions in the book. There were oblique references to the Philadelphia Experiment (one example is that "Mr. B." reassures his fellow annotators who have highlighted a certain theory which Jessup advanced). Based on the handwriting style and subject matter, Jessup concluded a large part of the writing was Allende's, and others have the same conclusion, that the three styles of annotations are from the same person using three pens.

According to Allende, officers at the ONR convinced the navy to fund a 1958 small printing of 25-100 copies of the volume. Jessup's main flying-saucer scenario came to resemble that of the Shaver Hoax perpetrated by the science-fiction magazine editor Raymond A. Palmer—namely, that "good" and "bad" groups of space aliens were/are meddling with terrestrial affairs.

Jessup tried to publish more books on the subject of UFOs, but was unsuccessful. Losing his publisher and experiencing a succession of downturns in his personal life led him to take his own life in Florida on April 30, 1959.

Mars moon hoax
For April Fool's Day 1959, Walter Scott Houston perpetrated a hoax in the April edition of the Great Plains Observer, writing that: "'Just last week Dr. Arthur Hayall of the University of the Sierras reports that the moons of Mars are actually artificial satellites... They are truly space stations in the most elaborate sense of the word... even though the race that flung them so magnificently into orbit may be dead and gone, they still orbit as the greatest monument to intelligent accomplishment yet known to mankind.'"

Both Dr. Hayall and the University of the Sierras were fictitious. The hoax gained worldwide attention when Houston's claim was repeated in earnest by a, who, based on a later-disproven density estimate, suggested Phobos was a hollow metal shell.

Also in April, Soviet scientist Iosif Shklovsky gave an interview with Pravda in which he voiced a suggested that Phobos might be hollow and possibly of artificial origin. Press noted that Sklovsky's sincere speculation were essentially identical to Houston's hoax.